Main menu

Tag Archives: x-men origins wolverine

Logan, the latest entry in the now ten (!) film X-Men movie canon from 20th Century Fox, really, really, really wants to be seen as serious cinema. Any time Johnny Cash’s now-cliched bluegrass cover of Nine Inch Nails’ tortured soul anthem “Hurt” is used in a flick’s trailer, you know you are in art school-aspirational territory.

(Dammit, Christopher Nolan, but your somber, bruise-black tone poem TheDark Knight must have been a real decade-long buzz kill for other directors in the comic book film genre. Folks, pretension ain’t entertainment. Movies can be smart and fun. Unclench. See: Deadpool.)

For 50% of its overlong running time, Logan comes within a razored-claw’s-breadth of hitting the mark. Yes, the allusions to George Stevens’ far superior Shane (including Patrick Stewart’s Professor Xavier actually watching the flick on a hotel room TV) and to just about any blood-and-dust-caked entry in Sam Peckinpah’s oeuvre are a bit too on-the-nose. However, those allusions are refreshing (if not downright surprising) in a film universe where we are supposed to accept Halle Berry’s ongoing struggles with stultifyingly bad wigs as the height of character development. (Bar none, Hugh Jackman is the best special effect these films have had in their arsenal in their nearly 20-year run.)

With 2013’s The Wolverine, director James Mangold did yeoman’s work rescuing the X-franchise’s beloved Wolverine from the character’s first solo outing – 2009’s disastrous X-Men Origins: Wolverine (directed by Gavin Hood). Lord, saving the character from that clunky title would have been enough. As evidence of Mangold’s leaning toward nihilistic simplicity, in fact, the titles have gotten more streamlined and look-I’m-a-grown-up grim with The Wolverine (just stick a “the” in front of anything … it sounds epic … seriously … try it: THE Mousepad, THE Saucepan, THE Q-Tip) and, now, Logan, which sounds less like a superhero movie and more like an artisanal bistro.

The Wolverine gave us a mutant-on-the-lam chase through the Japanese underworld with a zippy French Connection vibe that breathed new life into the character while honoring his comic book roots as an occasional samurai-for-hire. It was grounded by but also poppedwith a panoply of espionage thriller tropes, and Jackman seemed to be having a ball. Like all the films in the X-Men film universe, it suffered from a junky final act that was the cinematic equivalent of an eight-year-old throwing all of his/her action figures into a washing machine and setting the cycle to “spin,” creating more narrative loose ends than it resolved.

Logan is a logical next step, especially in this new era where “Hard R” (blood! guts! nudity! random eff-bombs!) superhero flicks now make truckloads of cash. (Thanks, again, Deadpool). While, heretofore, Wolverine’s legendary “berserker rage” has been safely shielded behind the no-gore filter of a toy-aisle-Taco-Bell-kids-meal-friendly PG-13 rating, Logan assumes all the tykes who saw the first X-Men film (2000) in wide-eyed wonderment at their parents’ knees are now safely beyond the age of R-rated consent. And, boy, does the carnage reign free in this movie.

The film begins in yellow-hued, grungy Texas in the year 2029, and Logan (hundreds of years old at this point, as we’ve learned from earlier films) is at the end of the line. His body is shot, his soul is worse, he is driving a limousine for moolah, and he and Professor Charles Xavier are living a hardscrabble existence in what appears to be an old grain silo. Their onscreen relationship here could best be described as one-part The Odd Couple, two-parts King Lear, with a pinch of Sam Shepard’s True West. They cohabitate with a fussy majordomo and mutant nursemaid Caliban (a haunting Stephen Merchant) as Xavier spirals into the latter stages of dementia, a diagnosis which is kind of a big deal when you also happen to possess the psychic power to wipe out half of the continental United States if your migraine gets out of hand.

This odd little band plans to ride out their days until Logan saves up enough money to buy a yacht (yes, a yacht), so that they – the only mutants remaining after some nebulously described cataclysm in the recent past – can escape the mutant-hating governmental rabble that runs ‘Murica (sound eerily familiar?). Oh, and Logan is probably going to commit suicide after they leave, but that just adds to the existential “fun.”

This set-up sounds odd. Hell, it is odd. I think that’s why I really dug the early scenes of the film, establishing this off-kilter “new normal” in the typically sleek, escapist X-Men universe. It reads like a stage play you might catch on PBS’ Great Performances on a Sunday night, when you’re feeling too lazy to change the channel – a piece that is not profound enough to have had a long run on Broadway but is peculiar enough to hold your interest on the small screen.

Into this mix, a young mutant appears, bearing strangely similar attributes to Logan, analogous enough that questions of parentage are raised. Newcomer Dafne Keen plays Laura (known in the comics as X-23), a preteen whose feral tendencies, extremely violent outbursts, and mute glowering are initially transfixing but wear a bit thin as the film proceeds. Naturally, the feds are chasing Laura, which brings the military-industrial complex as represented by a ham-bone Boyd Holbrook and Richard E. Grant to Logan’s front door … er … grain silo and sends the entire mutant band on the run across Texas, Oklahoma, and North Dakota.

Jackman is soulful throughout, and he channels the same world-weary tension of straining to keep a moral high ground while being consumed by the righteous rage of marginalization that he rode to an Oscar nomination in Les Miserables. Alas, he doesn’t sing this time, but he looks ten times as haggard … so that’s something. Jackman and Stewart have some touching moments, and Jackman has great chemistry with Keen in the film’s first half when they are still at odds with one another, like caged animals sizing up the competition.

There is a harrowing yet lovely scene where Professor Xavier reclaims a bit of his youthful nobility, rescuing horses that have gotten loose on a frighteningly busy freeway, which in turn leads to a brief respite where our mutants break bread with the gracious and grateful family to whom the equines belong. ER‘s Eriq LaSalle is quietly impressive as the patriarch – good to see him again. However, the film then takes a decidedly nasty turn, really embracing that R-rating (the horses are all fine, but – spoiler alert – things don’t work out quite so well for anyone else), and the silly and gratuitous horror movie carnage that follows left me disaffected – and saddened for where I had hoped the movie would have gone. Subsequently, I never quite reconnected with the brooding and pastoral quality that the first half of the film engendered, and the film’s final poignant moments – intended to deliver emotional payoff – don’t feel earned, ringing hollow when life seems so disposable to the filmmakers.

The talented cast and the film itself suffer from a running time (nearly two and a half hours) that doesn’t withstand the conventionality of the film’s road movie second half, and the flick’s final act is uncomfortably reminiscent of the denouement of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I didn’t much enjoy seeing a bunch of young mutants run pell mell through the woods fearing for their lives as they were brutalized by government thugs back in 2009, nor again in 2017. I wonder what a little cinematic discipline – a tighter running time and curbing the grand guignol indulgences – might have offered Logan. I suspect that a bit more restraint would have gotten Mangold’s film closer to those classic allegorical Westerns to which he clearly aspires.

[Image Source: Wikipedia]

Early in the film, Stewart’s Xavier, in deshabille and surrounded by the discarded detritus of a decaying life, looks ruefully at Jackman’s Logan and says, “I always know who you are. It’s just sometimes I don’t recognize you.” Using these iconic characters to explore the ephemeral nature of existence, Magold made a good film. It’s just too bad he didn’t have the self-control to make a great one.

Eye in the Sky, starring Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Barkhad Abdi and Alan Rickman (in one of his final performances) is about as perfect a film as I’ve seen in a long time and hands down is my favorite film of 2016 so far (though admittedly that bar is pretty low right now).

The film is a sophisticated but unpretentious examination of drone warfare in our 21st century civilization – our big blue marble, which is getting frighteningly smaller by the minute, so technologically advanced yet still so stone age barbaric.

The film, directed with economy and precision by Gavin Hood (Hood, I now can forgive you for X-Men Origins: Wolverine), is a narrative throwback to political potboilers like Three Days of the Condor, Black Sunday, or even 12 Angry Men and Judgment and Nuremberg with a healthy dose of vintage Playhouse 90 and BBC teleplays in its DNA. That’s a compliment, by the way.

Taking place in a single day, across three continents (Africa, North America, and Europe) the film’s action is constrained essentially to a board room, two “mission control”-type chambers, and one dusty town in Nairobi. It’s a rare film these days that relies on its actors to bring the slow-burn pyrotechnics, nary a green screen or lightsaber or cape in sight.

Not unlike recent true-life thriller Captain Phillips (which also featured Barkhad Abdi, in an Oscar-nominated performance), Eye in the Sky weaves cinematic tension around the tricky juxtaposition of the comfortably mundane and the horrifyingly extraordinary. Like Tom Hanks’ Phillips, the characters in Eye in the Sky have jobs to do, mortgages to pay, birthday gifts to pick up, dogs to feed, snoring spouses to ignore, food poisoning to overcome, bread to sell … all while making small and large philosophical gestures toward righting the perceived wrongs in a vast geopolitical landscape.

A ball of ethereal, blue-eyed twitch, Breaking Bad‘s Aaron Paul, who plays the Las Vegas-based drone pilot assigned to Eye in the Sky‘s particular mission, is asked by a colleague why he signed on to a military career. In a lesser film, he might have replied (with flag waving in the foreground and a vaguely patriotic theme swelling in the soundtrack), “For love of country … and freedom … and our way of life.” In Eye in the Sky, his answer? “I had a mountain of student loan debt, and this job guarantees me four years of income.” Yup.

It’s a little throwaway moment, but, coupled with similar moments (Rickman wrestling with the choice of inanely named dolls in a toy shop; Mirren padding out of bed at 4 am to feed her dog and check her email; Abdi bringing some dubious looking lunch containers to his surveillance monitoring colleague), the film offers incisive, sobering, ever-so-lightly-satiric commentary on human survival.

In the context of the film, Mirren is an intelligence operative, Rickman is British military, Paul is American military, and Abdi Kenyan intelligence/military. They are collaborating to bring down a terrorist cell on the move in Nairobi. The film opens with a pastoral depiction of a Kenyan family – father, mother, daughter – eking out a living, repairing bicycles and baking bread. The young daughter – newcomer Aisha Takow in a hauntingly subtle, heart-tuggingly luminous performance – is dutiful and bright, enjoying her hula hoop and books behind the walls of the family home, but hiding her light out of necessity when “fanatical” (her father’s words) customers come to their door. As the military (and comically inept bureaucratic) forces converge to strike down the terrorist cell next door, the easy, kind-hearted daily rituals of this little family end up in the cross-hairs (literally). I don’t want to spoil the film, but I could cry right now just typing this.

You must see this film. It is humanist. It is feminist. It is fair. There isn’t an ounce of jingoism, but it is patriotic- that is, if you see patriotism, not with the skewed xenophobic nationalist lens that has ruined the word, but as something that certain leaders must carry in their hearts and minds and actions to preserve a larger peace for us all. And the film never shies from the idea that said peace for one group has a yin/yang consequence on another group down the line. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Our political and military decisions carry racist, sexist, classist implications. They all come at a cost – to life on this planet and to our souls.

At the film’s conclusion, Rickman (who is a beautiful tempest of persistence and exasperation in the film) dresses down a well-intentioned bureaucrat to never doubt a military man’s (woman’s) deep awareness of the bloody price of war. That’s the genius of this film. No one is a villain; no one is a hero. Choices are made pragmatically, and it is that crushing pragmatism that tortures every character in the film. Ultimately, like us all, the characters in Eye in the Sky just hope to make it through their 9-5 days relatively unscathed, go home, take off their shoes, pet the dog, love their kids, and sleep.

_________________

When the director of the movie you’ve just reviewed tweets out your post … #Cloud9

How many Oscar winners and nominees does it take to put together a successful comic book adaptation? Apparently, a boatload.

The per capita of Academy Awards/nominations among the cast in X-Men: Days of Future Past is astounding: Ian McKellen, Jennifer Lawrence, Anna Paquin, Halle Berry, Hugh Jackman, Ellen Page, Michael Fassbender … not to mention talented folks like Peter Dinklage, Nicholas Hoult, James McAvoy, Evan Peters, and even director Bryan Singer who likely may find themselves on the receiving end of a nod or a statuette of their own one day.

As comic book adaptations go, this is about as good as they get, marrying a bit of the self-serious sermonizing of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knightfilms with the gee whiz ironic whimsy of Jon Favreau’s and Shane Black’s respective Iron Manmovies.

Having Singer return to the franchise (he rather unsuccessfully left to direct the bloated Superman Returns) is a stroke of much-needed genius. Other than last summer’s quietly effective The Wolverine, directed by James Mangold, or the zippy promise of Matthew Vaughn’s retro romp X-Men: First Class (Vaughn gets a writing credit on Days of Future Past), the series had started to lose its way with over-marketed, under-delivering, freakishly-merchandised failures like X-Men: The Last Stand (yeah, I’m a Brett Ratner hater too) or clunkily titled X-Men Origins: Wolverine (directed by Gavin Hood who went from Tsotsi and Rendition to X-Men Origins: Wolverine … wtf?)

Singer, not unlike J.J. Abrams with his seamless Star Trek reboot, brings us quite literally full-circle, mining all that has come before and brilliantly weaving the series’ best and crispest elements into a crackerjack narrative. The plot is a riff on Chris Claremont’s/John Byrne’s iconic “Days of Future Past” comics storyline from the early 80s. It details Wolverine’s mind-bending time travel leap from a dark dystopian future full of death and pain and murky CGI to a swinging 1970s full of death and pain and cheesy poly blends, all to avert a handful of historical moments that spark the creation of mutant-murdering robot Sentinels whose nefarious deeds bring about that nasty future everyone wants to avoid.

Clear as mud? It doesn’t matter ’cause the ride is a helluva lot of fun. The film isn’t perfect. I found this grim future-shock framing set-up with its overbaked Holocaust allusions, its bleak visuals, and its mopey characters and their endlessly ominous pronouncements rather tedious. Halle Berry (so miscast from the very first film) as weather-manipulating Storm still seems like she’s phoning her performance in from some all-inclusive Caribbean resort where they supply her an infinite series of bad white/gray wigs. And as much as I love McKellen and his comrade-in-arms Patrick Stewart as Magneto and Professor Charles Xavier respectively, they both appear to be marking time and collecting a paycheck (albeit a pretty hefty one).

However – and this is so key – all that Charles Dickens-meets-Philip K. Dick dreariness is essential to the fun once our time traveling mutant everyman (that would be Jackman with a crackling world-weary wit as Wolverine) hits the Me Decade. Everything comes alive.

McAvoy is so good – funny and haunting – as the young Xavier who has let his life (and fabulous mansion/school) go to seed. Fassbender (young Magneto) as the chillingly beautiful Malcolm X yin to McAvoy’s Martin Luther King yang is sharp as ever. The film smartly returns to Singer’s core hook: that mutant persecution is a righteous summer-blockbuster allegory for all the -isms/-phobias that plague our society and for the tension that always has and always will exist between the philosophies of blending/integration and of fighting/individualism.

All the players in the 1970s portion of the film acquit themselves nicely, from Lawrence’s fiery person-on-a-mission Mystique to Hoult’s worried caretaker Beast to Dinklage’s well-intentioned, quite-misguided military industrialist Trask.

The film’s best moments come from Evan Peters’ much-too-brief screen-time as speedster Quicksilver. He rocks every single freaking moment he has, like nothing I’ve ever seen in one of these tentpole epics. He wrings comic gold out of one word (“whiplash”) and has an absolute Bugs Bunny-esque ball torturing a gaggle of Pentagon guards, all set to the strain’s of Jim Croce’s time-warped classic “Time in a Bottle.” Give this character/actor his own movie. Now.

The smartest move of all in this very smart film? There is no villain. There is no mustache-twirling, blow-up-the-world, video-game-destructo fool in a cape leading us to a predictably cacophonous denouement. Nope. Everyone is their own worst enemy in this movie. Just like life. Fear and hate, self-loathing and prejudice those are the villains in this film, a movie which serves as a shiny pop metaphor for how much harm we do ourselves through inaction and anxiety.

Most importantly, X-Men: Days of Future Past leaves us with hope. No situation and no person are ever beyond redemption, as Stewart tells McAvoy in one of the film’s trippiest and most heartfelt moments. Amen to that.

Between the ubiquitous marketing onslaught, the gaggle of colorful villains, the four-quadrant prestige casting, and the manically overeager trailers, I walked into summer 2014’s kick-off blockbuster The Amazing Spider-Man 2 dreading an overstuffed, overbaked, underdeveloped camp-fest like Batman & Robin or X-Men Origins: Wolverine or … The Grand Budapest Hotel. (Just kidding on that last reference, though I really did hate that movie.)

Color me surprised (sort of).

I adored the 2012 reboot starring Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. I thought director Marc Webb hit all the right notes of scruffy young angst, of familial love and resentment, and of just making ends meet and getting through a day … let alone having your life extra-complicated after having been bitten by a radioactive spider. The Sam Raimi films with Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst, while zippy and fun, just never really felt that grounded to me.

Blessedly, those relatable elements remain, though they are buried under a mountain of back-story and subplots. Garfield is winsome and charming as Peter Parker/Spider-Man – imagine if Anthony Perkins grew up a Millennial hipster and played a haunted spandex-ed superhero who hid his pain under glib one-liners and silly puns. And Stone as girlfriend Gwen Stacy is the perfect foil, more than holding her own amongst car crashes and emo dates alike. I will admit to finding their snappy teen repartee a bit cloying at times, but generally they remain the heart and soul of this series.

Sally Field also returns as Peter’s Aunt May, bringing free-floating yet fiercely protective anxiety and determined iron will to the role. She has one scene (as Field seems to in every movie in which she appears) that brought me to tears while I cheered her on – a quiet scene where she asserts once and for all that while she may not be Peter’s mother, she raised him and is the only family that counts.

Other cast members include Jamie Foxx as nebbish-turned-power-mad-demigod Max Dillon/Electro, Dane DeHaan as Parker’s childhood-pal-turned-chief nemesis Harry Osborn/Green Goblin, and a criminally underutilized Paul Giamatti (though if he’d been used properly, the movie would have been four hours long, instead of two and a half) as a scenery-chewing (literally) Russian-mobster-turned-mechanical Rhino.

Thematically, the film turns on a central concept of “being seen.” Gwen Stacy wants to know she has true value in Peter’s life. Aunt May wants Peter to know the sacrifices she has made to protect him at much cost to her own happiness. Osborn wants to redeem himself in the eyes of an industrialist father (Chris Cooper) who shipped him off to boarding schools like he was disposing of a pest.

And most overtly, Max/Electro wants the world to acknowledge his presence and his contributions in the moment, not to steal his ideas, and to simply remember his name. Some may find Jamie Foxx’s performance hammy (it is just shy of Jim Carrey’s Riddler in Batman Forever); I found it compelling. To me, Foxx walks a fine line between comic book silliness and heartfelt poignancy, giving us a Marty-style loser … that is if Ernest Borgnine had been dropped in a vat of angry electric eels and garnered lightning powers as a result.

I enjoyed this film a lot, but it is way too long and tries to accomplish too much. Yes, comic book fanboys, like yours truly, love to see all manner of minutiae from fifty years of four-color canon honored (and reinvented) on the big screen. But, we also like to see compelling movies well-made that tell a story efficiently, effectively, and seemingly effortlessly.

Unfortunately, I could feel the gears grinding together a few too many times in Amazing Spider-Man 2 as Webb and screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci labored to stitch together countless disparate threads. I also could feel the Sony studio heads rubbing their hands together with money-grubbing glee as they planned out the multitude of spin-offs and sequels that this flick might generate.

Regardless, the movie is an exceptionally entertaining enterprise, and that is chiefly due to a crackerjack cast that imbues the material with generous spirit, empathetic soul, sparkling wit, and loving heart.